Neal's Cooking

I hate to start sounding trite, but I am so thankful for my husband, especially for how much he likes food. When we first got married, neither of us really knew or wanted to put the effort into making elaborate meals. I once made Neal gnocchi when we were dating, but then life seemed to get too busy to bother with that kind of stuff. We spent much of this year subsisting on cheap and easy fixes (and more eating out than I would like to admit to). But I am proud to display one of Neal's delicious dinners:

That is baked ziti (actually rigatoni, but who's counting?) with mozzarella, ricotta cheese, and ground beef. He got the idea from pining for Sbarro food, and he just decided to do it himself. A big inspiration for me to quit hating cooking and actually make time for it.

We got so many cooking-related things for Christmas and for our anniversary that I'm started to get excited about cooking again. On Neal's sister Amanda's advice, we're going to try Bountiful Baskets starting next semester. Maybe that will convince us to eat a bit healthier, too.

I started using Pinterest (a fact I'm almost ashamed to admit . . .), and I've been doing some browsing for quick and easy recipes to add to the books we have. Next year, I want Neal and I to be eating more healthfully, and I want to cut costs on our grocery bills. I think I'll be drafting a New Year's resolution post pretty soon, and food/cooking will definitely be on that list.

Christmas at Fort Hewitt

The stairway, with lights and gold tinsel.

Neal and I are going to be in Northern California for Christmas proper, so we're going to celebrate Christmas here on the 22nd, with the 21st serving as Christmas Eve. We've gotten presents from our families that are sitting in Amazon boxes and the like until I decide to wrap them. Ha. But in the meantime, check out some of our decorations:

 Neal got so excited about Christmas decorations, which I'm really grateful for. That's not to say my family didn't celebrate Christmas to some degree, but we just had a few standard decorations that we could typically put up in an hour or two. Neal got a good Black Friday deal on Christmas lights and decorations. He took an afternoon or two to get the lights strung up on the stairway and all across the family room. I wasn't sure about it at first, but I really like the lighting. So does Neal. Very nostalgic for him.

He also found this Charlie Brown Christmas decoration, which is pretty cute. He's really happy to be building up a collection of things we can take out every year.

  Our first nativity set! It was about $6.00, but I really like it.

And, finally, our Christmas tree. Neal put up the lights, and I put up the ornaments. It's in the corner of our house, by the couch and right next to that TV we have to sell on KSL or something. In the background are the advent calendars we made. I'd never done those before, but I have no complaints about another excuse to eat candy.

Speaking of, I think both Neal and I have the New Year's resolution of losing weight. Yeah, we'll see about that.

On the bright side, only two more pages of essay and one more final until this semester can be over for me. Oh, my head hurts.

Recovery, Friends, and Strangers

I may not be quite done with my finals yet, but I've had a couple of wonderful days with my friends. Neal took me to Leading Edge yesterday even though I definitely did not want to go. I thought I had way too much work to do and that everyone else could handle it. 

We got there just in time to run into our friend Emily, and we spent an hour exchanging proposal stories, both for ourselves and for people we knew. Emily told us how clueless she was as to the situation, how when her man had started singing her a romantic song while they were taking a beautiful hike, she had just sung along with him. I love our friends.

Highlight of the evening might be when a complete stranger in the editing room spun around and told us his proposal plans for next week. Only at BYU could this be a bonding topic for random people. But I love it. I love remembering what it felt like to be almost engaged, and I love thinking about how much happier I am now, even if the butterflies and giddiness have faded a bit.

Also, my Relief Society president took some family pictures of us yesterday, so we'll be sending those out soon with a Christmas newsletter. I like the picture we chose for family updates, even if I look dorky (totally my own fault. I never really learned how to smile with my eyes open).

Neal and I are putting together Christmas plans. We've exchanged some gift ideas, and I'm going to look around and see what I can get that would be special. Overall, I'm feeling more capable of handling then next few weeks. I'm grateful for family, friends, and supportive strangers and acquaintances. It's been getting me through.

Dealing with Finals Week

I'm not really sure I'm going to hit everything I want to talk about in this post. And that's okay.

This finals week is very hard, is going to be very hard. I have to unexpectedly fly out to California next week because of my dad's health. I still have to take my theory midterm later this week. I've been sick on and off all week. I just want this semester to be over, but it just. Won't. End.

Neal has been great at getting me through this. We've "rescheduled" our Christmas celebration to be on the December 22 so we can still have some time together. Our wonderful brother-in-law has offered to drive us to the airport from his place, where we're going to keep the car parked while we're gone. Our friend Emily has offered to take care of our cat, even if she (the cat) is not always the most pleasant thing to be around.

My professors have been so considerate and understanding. I've gotten extensions on my harder finals, I've gotten emails of consolation and understanding, and anybody I have any obligation to knows what's going on and is going to make sure I don't have too much more to deal with this week.

Why am I blogging when I could be finishing my homework? It's . . . just psychology. It's easier to get lost in the internet right now. Not a great habit, but I'm just trying to cope at this point. Rest assured that I've read about five different feminist theory essays and will be putting together an outline for my final paper for that class . . . probably today. I also skimmed through an entire book on CSS today, and I'm doing a write-up for that right now. I have to go to campus and program because they have an FTP client that lets me edit pages without transferring them to my desktop. I have Filezilla on the home computer, but it's a pain and it barely works right, I swear. But I really don't want to leave the house right now. Not sure what to do.

And now I don't know how to end this blog. Probably just by hitting the Publish button. Will do.

6 months

This Tuesday, Neal and I celebrated our six-month anniversary. Well, if you call making muffins and doing lots of homework celebrating. I do.

Time has been passing by so quickly since we got married. It's finally hitting me that I'm a junior in college. I'm halfway done. Just four more semesters (and an internship next summer) and I can start applying for entry-level positions. In a career. I mean, dang.

Good news on the school front: Neal and I have been preparing for him to go to UVU in the fall, and we just found out that we have a good chance of qualifying for residency. Originally, I thought that if I became a Utah resident, it could apply to Neal, but apparently not. I became a Utah driver for nothing. But Neal's a full-fledged Utah resident now, and he just needs to get a letter from his employer to prove it. And then we save 4,000 a semester on tuition. Pell grants will carry us through. It's a huge relief.

And he just got off the waitlist for a creative writing class that he needs to take this fall to graduate on time. Getting that notification was such a relief, too. I think I can finally relax now.

Or I could if I didn't have to read about 150 pages of Norton anthologies a week. Sigh. Oh, summer term.

Getting excited

Photo from jerryfergusonphotography. Creative Commons License.

Every so often I like to check out what the publishing world has to offer for jobs. I look specifically for jobs that require a year or two of copyediting experience, which I will have when I graduate. And more and more often, I'm drawn to New York. That's just where the center of the physical publishing industry is (though that might change by the time I graduate, which will be interesting. I would love to see the geographical effects that eBooks have on publishing), and that's where the jobs I want are, for the most part. But Neal and I have been talking about housing, and we know that we want to live in a home, not an apartment. That we want to have a backyard and live in a good neighborhood. Not something that we could really find in New York.

But I've been starting to look at New Jersey home listings, and I'm starting to love some of the houses up there. Lots of them are really old, maybe not something we would want to take on as newlyweds, but there are some houses that look to be in good shape and that have the kind of amenities that I would want. They're usually within the 250k-375k range, which makes them affordable (I guess. That's the El Dorado Hills part of me talking. In all likelihood, we would have to live in an apartment and save up money for a few years before we could do that), and so I'm getting hopeful. I know at least Penguin Books doesn't start the workday until 9:00 am, so there would be plenty of time to start public transit around 7 in the morning and just bring a book with me on the way. I'm getting really excited about this.

Is there anyone out there who knows of good New Jersey towns for both suburban-ish living and a good commute to New York? That knowledge would be much appreciated.

The Task to Improve

I haven't posted on my personal blog for a while because I've been so busy with my school blog, but I've decided anew that I want to work on my marriage, on myself, and on my work habits. I got the inspiration for this particular blog post by reading my classmate Bri's blog about how she maintains her marriage. That post is full of great advice, and I recommend everyone to read it.

Before I went to church this Sunday, a couple of experiences prepared my heart to begin this process of improvement. After a frustrating experience at the DMV that could have cost us thousands of dollars (because of UVU's state residency requirements. Neal will be attending UVU in the fall), I was completely devastated and despondent. Neal tried to convince me that maybe I couldn't always have things my way. I had tried my best, and the rest was in God's hands. It wasn't exactly what I wanted to hear at the moment (this is why I need to be improving, I guess), but that experience kept my mind open for similar advice that I got from a friend in my editing class.

I saw Aaron with his head down on his desk. He was catching a few winks of sleep during the class break. I asked him how his newborn baby was, and we chatted about spring term. Aaron told me that he was going through the double pressures of spring term only so he could graduate faster. He had a new baby girl and a wife that needed to be supported, so he was taking all the classes he could manage so that he could more quickly obtain a salaried job. In the meantime, he told me, he was working two part-time jobs just to put the food on the table.

"School., two jobs, and a newborn baby?" I said. "I don't know how you do it."

He replied simply, "It's called relying on Jesus."

Bear in mind that Aaron also finishes all his homework well ahead of class, something I regularly fail to do. This advice combined with the thorough heart softening I had received with my own husband served as the perfect preparation for church on Sunday.

During Sunday School, the first counselor announced that we would be having a surprise combined Relief Society / Elders Quorum meeting. The guest speakers were Brother and Sister Smith, who had recently returned from serving in the Marshall Islands Mission. Brother Smith gave a brilliant metaphor for how we must approach life. He told us about when he and our bishop went out snowmobiling together, and how the only way to make it up the snow-covered mountain was to always keep your thumb pressed down on the throttle. If you were to get scared, release your grip, the snowmobile would topple over backwards because of the steep slope, and you would get seriously hurt. The idea struck me that this was what I needed to do.

I've always had a problem with keeping up my momentum. If I get on the computer in the middle of my homework assignments, I just lose all motivation to do them and wind up procrastinating until the last possible moment. But today I've decided differently. Here are the things that I'm going to be most working on:

1. Gospel study: 100 percent for 100 days. Apparently this program has been emphasized in my ward and I knew nothing about it. It's really simple: do everything you're supposed to do consistently until it becomes a lifelong habit. This means personal and family scripture study and prayer, at least monthly visits to the temple, consistent family home evenings and date nights, and daily reminders of love and affection for your spouse. Neal has agreed heartily to this task, and I'm excited to see our relationship improve as we draw closer to the Savior and to ourselves.

2. Cleaning the house. Also when I was in Relief Society, I grabbed a chore list for daily, weekly, monthly, and seasonal tasks that would keep our house in better order. Being tidy has also been a long struggle for me, and I've adapted these chores to fit our household. As much as neither Neal nor I am used to this consistent cleaning, I've gotten him to agree, at least to see how it works out. I'm really hoping that we can maintain the drive here because I don't want to live in filth.

3. Doing my homework well and on time. This, for me, is where "keeping my thumb on the throttle" really comes into play. As I said before, I have a huge procrastination problem, so it really comes down to treating my homework like the job that it is and doing it with my best effort and as much attention as I can muster. I hope that keeping on top of my schoolwork will leave more time for me to spend with Neal.

In conclusion, wish me luck. I have a lot of work to do.